COLUMN ONE : To British, Bard’s a Bit of a Bore : There’s the rub. It’s American money that’s keeping Shakespeare’s legacy alive.

The BBC’s World Service was broadcasting live recently from what has been called the most historic theatrical area in the Western World--the Holy Grail of drama on the South Bank of the River Thames, where during just 10 remarkable months this year archeologists found the remains of two 400-year-old Shakespearean playhouses.

Program host John Tidmarsh interrupted his interview with British actress Jane Lapotaire to apologize for the noise of a jackhammer from the site where a modern office building is being constructed over the remains of one of those playhouses, the Rose.

“This particular Philistine working on the drill absolutely refuses to stop,” Tidmarsh told his audience. “We’ve asked him three or four times.”

“There you go, you see, John,” commented Lapotaire. “Modern buildings are more important than historical remains.”

While that may be one message of the incident, the stubborn worker is also symbolic of what, for many here, is a more embarrassing truth: As proud as they may be of their fabled 16th-Century playwright in the abstract, his compatriots actually treat William Shakespeare’s memory rather shabbily.

To many English, it seems, the Bard is a bore. And if it weren’t for Americans, there would probably be fewer major British monuments to his work and considerably less knowledge of him around the world.

“Americans are quite enthusiastic about Shakespeare; your average Brit isn’t,” conceded Jilian Ingham, marketing manager for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon, the Bard’s birthplace. “I don’t know whether it’s because he’s run down children’s throats at school or what.”

It was almost exclusively American money that built the company’s two theaters in Stratford. And judging from signatures in the visitors’ book at the house in which Shakespeare was born, only about one out of three people who came last year was from Britain, according to a spokesman for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Writing in the September issue of In Britain, a magazine published by the British Tourist Authority, Stratford native Edmund Antrobus told of escorting an American group to a performance of “Henry IV” at the Royal Shakespeare Theater not long ago. The Americans were so wildly enthusiastic that their loud applause at the final curtain embarrassed him, Antrobus wrote. Meanwhile, “Many English viewers, I observed, were nodding off in the midst of the best scenes.”

While the Bard’s plays are probably taught more widely in British schools and staged more frequently in British theaters than anywhere else, there are reputedly more Shakespearean scholars in Japan than in England.

“There’s a shortage of Shakespeare scholarship in Britain,” acknowledged Prof. Andrew Gurr, a Shakespeare specialist at England’s Reading University. He said only two of the eight “major” world experts on the Bard are in the United Kingdom.

Even Oxford University Press’ definitive “William Shakespeare: The Complete Works” is edited jointly by a Briton, Stanley Wells, and an American, Gary Taylor.

“There is a kind of rivalry, of course, between the United Kingdom and North America, in scholarly terms, over who owns Shakespeare,” said Taylor in a telephone interview from his Maryland home.

Here in London, it’s an irrepressible, 71-year-old Chicago-born actor and director named Sam Wanamaker who has waged a tenacious, 20-year battle to reconstruct Shakespeare’s famous Globe Theater on the South Bank of the Thames, only a few hundred yards from the spot where the foundations of the original playhouse were discovered early last month.

“I feel passionately that Sam is right--and very ashamed that it’s taken us 400 years and an American to get the project off the ground,” actress Lapotaire told the British Broadcasting Corp.

Wanamaker, well known to American movie and television audiences, is clearly frustrated by the difficulty he has had raising financial support here for his nonprofit project, which is now scheduled for completion on the 428th anniversary of the Bard’s birth, in 1992.

“I’m saying to the Brits now, ‘Do you really want the rest of the world to build this thing that is your heritage?’ ” commented the lifelong Shakespeare buff who first came to London on a job in 1949 and has lived here for most of the last 40 years. “This is like cutting their own veins.”

Wanamaker says he still figures that at least 35% of the $31 million needed to build the “New Globe” will have to be raised in the United States. Another 15% is to come from other foreign sources. The remaining 50%, he said, is “what must be done by the British. . . . They cannot avoid or evade that responsibility.”

The only money the British government has put up is a small grant through the Tourist Board that Wanamaker said in an interview has so many strings attached that he still can’t touch it. He described the bureaucracy’s attitude as: “Don’t expect any money from us. We’ve got enough Shakespeare” in Stratford.

And with effective cuts in government cultural subsidies generally, including one that has left the Royal Shakespeare Company $2 million in the red, the prospects for a change of heart appear slim.

Even the official Arts Council looked askance at his project, Wanamaker added, originally dismissing it as “museum theater” and a Disneyland approach. He had to go to court to defend his dream against South London politicians who wanted to keep the land for redevelopment.

Now there are new questions about the remains of the Rose and the original Globe. The government refused earlier this year to “list” the Rose site, which would have effectively barred new construction, despite a concerted campaign urging it to do so. In what archeologists and Shakespeare lovers call a disappointing compromise, developers agreed that the new office building under construction there will be perched on stilts, so the remains of the Rose can be displayed beneath.

Future excavation of the original Globe hinges on a dispute over whether a “listed” 19th-Century building that covers part of the site should be razed.

“Poor old Shakespeare is a classic victim of our appalling planning system,” said Harvey Sheldon, senior archeologist at the Museum of London.

If the Bard’s memory receives less than unqualified honor in modern Britain, historians note that it’s not a big change from past treatment. Shakespeare’s Stratford-Upon-Avon home, called New Place, was demolished in 1759 by a cranky clergyman who got fed up with the constant stream of visitors trespassing on his property to peer at the empty monument next door.

It wasn’t until the next century that a local brewer promoted the idea of erecting a Shakespeare memorial theater in Stratford, and even then there was so little popular financial support that the businessman had to dip into his own pocket for most of the money.

When the first theater burned down in 1926, the grandson of that same brewer barnstormed America to raise the money for a replacement, even collecting donations from schoolchildren.

The second Stratford theater, the Swan, was the gift of a wealthy Kansas City man.

“It may be true that rich Americans are keener on Shakespeare than rich English people,” said scholar Wells, who is also chairman of an academic advisory council to Wanamaker’s New Globe project.

It is no surprise to Wells that Americans dig deep to support Shakespeare, a universal playwright whose drama “you can transform into ‘West Side Story.’ ”

The Bard “permeates cultures other than our own, which may make other countries feel they care more about Shakespeare than the English,” he explained.

Also, added Wells, “I think there’s a sort of nostalgia among Americans for the homeland. It’s partly a lack of major figures in American culture that makes them latch onto others.”

Wanamaker thinks the British, whom he describes as improving but still somewhat “condescending about Americans,” count on that nostalgia. The common attitude, he said, is: “The Americans are rich. The Americans look to Britain for their culture and heritage. So why not put the bite on the Americans?”

Wells also argued that the British government’s weak response to the Rose and Globe discoveries is typical.

“I think it’s partly lack of confidence in their own judgment as to what is important and what isn’t,” he opined. “Also, fear of offending financial interests.”

Neither financial nor any other interests seemed to care much about the riverfront near Southwark Bridge for many years. It was a mostly rundown industrial section that Londoners knew mainly from driving through it on their way to country homes in the south and east.

“South London has always been the dumping ground” for the city, said Wanamaker. During Shakespeare’s time, “all the thieves, the prostitutes, the vagabonds, the beggars--the lowest level of society--were on this side of the river.”

South London was home to the famous “Klink” prison and other city jails. The favorite spectator sport there was watching a pack of wild dogs attack a bear tethered in the center of a small, open-air arena--and betting on which would survive.

It was here, nevertheless, that the golden age of Elizabethan theater flowered during a remarkable creative burst at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries. The plays not only of Shakespeare but also of Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe were written during this period and performed at one of four theaters, all located within a few blocks of each other.

By 1642, the Puritans had closed them all, and their remains were lost under succeeding generations of factories, warehouses and tenements.

While Shakespearean scholars have long known approximately where those playhouses must have been, there was little awareness among the general public of the South Bank’s illustrious past.

“Most Britons, and most Americans as well, either thought the Globe was in Stratford-Upon-Avon or didn’t know where it was at all,” said Wanamaker. “And 99.9% of the British people had never heard of the Rose.”

That much, at least, has now changed forever. The public will be able to view at least some portion of the remains of both the Globe and the Rose. And construction on Wanamaker’s New Globe is well under way.

The former Chicagoan sees the discoveries of the Rose and the original Globe as a vindication of his two decades of campaigning and “the happiest piece of timing I can imagine.”

The construction schedule on his project is such that there is time “that we can really discover what the (original) Globe was, and adjust our plans accordingly,” he said.

That’s assuming he can now get Shakespeare’s compatriots to be a bit more generous in support of their Bard’s memory.